


Limerence

by shanatical



Category: Fire Emblem: Fuukasetsugetsu | Fire Emblem: Three Houses
Genre: Bernadetta von Varley's Father's Bad Parenting, Childhood Friends, Denial of Feelings, F/M, Feelings Realization, Fix-It of Sorts, Gender-Neutral My Unit | Byleth, Implied Sexual Content, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Misunderstandings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-02-19
Updated: 2020-02-21
Packaged: 2021-02-28 02:28:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,878
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22796308
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/shanatical/pseuds/shanatical
Summary: Yuri fails. Yuri falls.It takes him years to land.
Relationships: Yuris Leclair | Yuri Leclerc/Bernadetta von Varley
Comments: 39
Kudos: 518





	1. Chapter 1

Yuri hasn’t thought of the name Bernadetta von Varley of his own volition in ages.

It’s a red mark in his ledger, a faltering failure standing head and shoulders above a sea of sly, hard-won successes. It irks him to dwell on that night, with her still and defenseless and his hand frozen, unable to follow through on a stab he had done countless times before, with far more practice and far less hesitance than a gardner’s assistant his age ought to have had.

He had hesitated then, and he had paid for it. He _had_ escaped with his life, though, and so he struggled forward just the same as ever, putting the sorry affair squarely behind him and forging ahead.

His face healed, flawlessly, as did the bruises and wounds and broken ribs his rather… _abrupt_ exit from the Varley estate left him with. He milked them for sympathy from traveling merchants, reported his failure to the intermediary who would have paid him, and headed west. Once they hit a town bigger than just another podunk village, he disappears into less _official_ channels and retires his garden boy pseudonym for the next one on his list.

He goes through about three new identities and nearly five times as many successful jobs before somebody brings up the name he has most certainly not been thinking about.

“I heard the heir of Varley has been in mourning for her grandfather for years,” his current target says in a salon in Enbarr,murmuring to another boy their age.

The young, _lovely_ noble ladies milling in with the group of young, _promising_ noblemen immediately pounce on the subject.

“Really?” One covers her mouth with her fan in a clumsy parody of shock that turns Yuri’s stomach. Amateurs, the lot of them. _“I_ heard she’s sickly—so frail she can barely use her Crest.”

 _Hardly._ Yuri has to fight back a snort, remembering the girl who trotted after him with all the eagerness and energy of a puppy. The damn shears fiasco had been caused in part by her tripping and double-throwing the tool in question in a Crest-triggered misfire, otherwise he would have spared his face and just dodged properly.

A slightly older girl with a sterner cast to her face—the leftovers from last year’s social debut, Yuri clocks her as soon as he sees her—frowns and shakes her head. “No, I heard that she’s actually quite prodigious when it comes to Dark Magic, like her mother before her, and secludes herself to study.”

 _Preposterous._ The girl he knows…

Knew. _Knew._ The girl he _knew_ preferred the fine arts to the magical arts hands down, any day of the week. A deft hand with a quill when turned to a purpose that pleased her, sure, but hardly ever for studying _._

“Is that so?” A soft, cultured voice breaks in, bright and eager. “My father, Duke Aegir,” says the perfectly coiffed boy who can only be Ferdinand von Aegir, “has recently been in talks with the Count about perhaps arranging a few meetings between his doubtlessly lovely daughter and myself. I must confess my curiosity has been quite piqued!”

Yuri’s _killing intent_ is damn near piqued, because what the _hell_ does this kid think he’s doing? You can’t just _say_ shit like that in the heart of Enbarr of all places. Oblivious as she is to the world outside of the gilded cage that is her ancestral seat, that girl already has too many targets painted on her back than he cares to count; having _Future Duchess Aegir_ pasted on would just be the poisoned cherry on top of it all.

His gut clenches sickly at the thought, because of how heinously politically inept the next Prime Minister is going to grow up to be, surely.

The near-fact that the little airheaded tagalong he remembers wouldn’t last five days with this earnest moron on her arm is a thought that barely ghosts along the back of his mind.

“Chlothar?” His target glances up, brow cocked, jolting Yuri back into the here and now. “What is it? You’re wearing the _oddest_ look right now.”

 _Shit._

No. No, this is fine, it’s _Yuri,_ he can handle this. ...well, technically it’s ‘Chlothar’ at that particular moment, but that’s semantics.

“Well,” he drawls out softly, eyes down, the very picture of respect and reluctance. “That is—my lord must understand, it’s only hearsay, of course. But servants talk to servants who... _occasionally_... talk to far-off relatives in the Varley territory. I may have heard some things myself.”

“Well, don’t leave us hanging in suspense!” The fan-girl trills, eyes glinting.

“Yes,” his target agrees. “What _have_ you heard about the mysterious Miss Varley?”

Yuri hems and hesitates, a perfect servant torn between obedience and propriety, and in the meantime leafs through what he knows about the Prime Minister’s son—his weaknesses, his preferences…

And, of course, his fears.

Back behind his own eyes, Yuri smiles in a way that is all teeth. On the outside, he gives the gossiping baby nobles a doleful, defeated look and bows his head, speaking quietly. As one, they mindlessly lean in, hook, line, and sinker.

“You didn’t hear this from me, of course,” he insists, pushing up his fake glasses.

“Of course,” his target assures him.

“We are the very souls of discretion,” Fan-Girl swears to him, doe-eyed, which means that surely every girl of an age in Enbarr will know by dusk tomorrow.

His lips curl brightly in a way that isn’t entirely manufactured, for once.

“Thank you _so_ much, sirs and misses,” he says, straight from the heart. “Now, you didn’t hear this from me, of course, _but…”_

He spins a tale off the cuff, folding lie in with truth and embellishing it just grandly enough that he knows they’ll eat it up gladly. He talks about her fledgeling attempts at felting little dolls, but phrases it in such a way that a lazy, uninformed mind might jump to thinking of as sinister, rather than a new and innocent crafting project. He weaves the new habit of reclusiveness she has taken to in his absence into something just shy of foreboding. He talks and he talks and he doesn’t _lie,_ really, but it’s hardly _his_ fault that they don’t have the context to properly see the whole of who and what she is.

If they come out of this thinking that her talents are marks against her, well… that’s on _them_ , isn’t it? Who told them to go and take some _commoner’s_ words as gospel?

Ferdinand von Aegir excuses himself from the get-together early, citing a sudden but _very_ urgent matter he just recalled which needed his parents’ attention posthaste, and Yuri allows himself a brief, hidden moment of satisfaction while the rest of the nobles go through the longwinded song and dance of social niceties and farewells.

When they refocus, he steers the conversation towards them pressing him for more under-the-stairs gossip, and segues into talking about a recent rise in the usage of love potions that a certain chamber maid told him about. A few pointed details, an offhanded mention of the signs and flavors he’s supposedly been lead to believe are accurate…

Too easy. Within two days, Yuri’s target breaks up with his daughter-of-a-baronet secret girlfriend, and the young man’s father has paid Yuri as handsomely as he promised.

The (now infamous) daughter of Count Varley has become an overnight boogeyman just as quickly, smothering at least a dozen idle plans for courtship in the cradle.

 _Pfft._ Nobles are honestly so petty it's pathetic, sometimes.

His sense of accomplishment and disdain carries him along a few weeks. It’s bolstered briefly by the latest ingenue the Mittelfrank Opera Company has uncovered, the young and beautiful and common as _dirt_ Dorothea Arnault. The ruling class all but trips over itself to faun over a finely dressed urchin, tossing praise and flowers at her feet—

 _“I_ **_love_ ** _hearing you sing,” she admits, glancing up at him shyly behind long, purple bangs. “You ought to be on stage!”_

_“Oh? Tired of me already?”_

_“Never!” She shakes her head so wildly she nearly topples into the rose bush he’s pruning that day. He catches her before she can. “Not_ **_ever_** _. I just… I think you’re so amazing. I_ **_never_ ** _want you to leave but… it’s such a waste for somebody talented like you to be cooped up here with me forever. …i-is that weird to say?”_

He stuffs the memory back from whence it came almost violently when his latest ‘employer’ wraps her arms around him from behind, finely-rouged lips pressing up the side of his throat.

“You’ve got such a _look_ in your eyes, darling,” she cooes at him. “It’s a lovely piece, to be sure, but I hadn’t realized just how much you like it. I’ll just have to keep you close so you can see when it hatches, I suppose.”

 _What the hell is she on about,_ Yuri wonders, even as he forces himself to melt into her embrace. Belatedly, he realizes that amidst his woolgathering, his gaze had fallen onto an ornate cage in the corner of the boudoir. He focuses on the woman’s voice, rather than what her body is doing.

“The cage is carved from a single piece of white jade,” she boasts. “I’m told it took _years_ to craft. The door slides up, but will be too heavy for the chick to lift on its own.”

“The… chick?” Yuri asks, faking a musical moan.

“I suppose it’s no surprise an unworldly creature like you wouldn’t know,” she says, and he counts the ways he could make her choke on those words one by one to keep his body loose and pliant. “It’s a Kinshi egg—they’re terribly rare, and used to be the exclusive mounts of some far off fallen kingdom’s royal family, they say. The birds age slowly, but I’m told their plumage is to _die_ for.”

“Amazing,” Yuri praises her half-heartedly, though luckily she’s too absorbed in her own endeavors to catch on.

He’s able to keep quite a few irons in the fire around that time, when Arnaultomania is in its fever pitch and a pretty lowborn singer is even more of a hot commodity than usual, but he finds that by the time he starts tying up loose ends, something inside of himself has… not so much changed as _shifted._

Cooled.

Solidified.

“Sing another for me, won’t you, Gale?”

By chance, he’s with the Kinshi woman his last night in the city. He’s tired, and singing has come to be a chore rather than a talent to be proud of; the thought of another song brings a prick of bile to the back of his throat.

He bats his eyes at her and stretches out in her silky, overly perfumed sheets. “One more song and my voice will be ruined for days. And _then_ how will I ever manage to keep your interest?”

She pouts at him in a way no woman over the age of twenty has a right to even try, and he casts about for a distraction before his threadbare patience snaps entirely. His gaze lands on the jade cage and the now-hatched Kinshu chick, rumpled and butter-yellow and so clearly depressed with its living situation its a wonder the little thing hasn’t done something drastic.

Tiredly, thoughtlessly, he offers a story in place of a song. His mark is delighted to accept.

“Once there was a girl,” he says, eyes still affixed to the chick, mind fogged with a fatigue that goes beyond the physical. “A little noble girl. She had good breeding from her father, and a brilliant beauty for a mother, but she was shy and clumsy and so very… very… _delicate.”_

He thinks of bruised and scraped knees, teary iron-gray eyes, thinks of soothing words and bloody, soil-smeared, split skin beneath his lips.

He has put his mouth on far filthier things and to far filthier purpose since then, he realizes.

“One day, she met a boy. He worked in her family’s garden,” Yuri continues, because why not? He hadn’t intended to spill the story when he first opened his mouth, but it will save him the effort of coming up with something original, at least. He spreads the whole tale out—the boy, the budding friendship, the good days, the idyllic time spent in that blooming garden, in that gilded, inescapable cage that was her little world.

How the boy was a _liar,_ and a scoundrel, and worse.

How he crept into her room, spied her sleeping, peaceful and unsuspecting, how he raised the blade high—

How he lowered it again, bewildered and frustrated.

“Well, of _course_ he couldn’t do it,” his audience of one scoffs, jolting him out of the memory of that room, that night, that _sight_ of her, pale and dreaming of something pleasant. “There’s no way he could have.”

“Oh?” He forces a laugh, light and airy and flirtatious. “I never took you for a master assassin.” She wouldn’t know one if he was staring her in the face, he thinks spitefully. “Why do _you_ think he couldn’t do it, then?”

She rolls her overly-shadowed eyes. “Gale, sweetheart, don’t bother playing coy over something so obvious. It’s clear as a bell that the boy was in lo—”

She falls back, choking on her own blood.

Yuri blinks, and slowly shifts his gaze from the cage to the blade in his hand. He had lashed out without any conscious thought, on his part, but one way or another she was going to have kicked the bucket before he left her bedroom for the last time. He glances down at her corpse and sneers, the coldest and hardest Enbarr has made him yet in this moment.

“Grow _up_ , you crazy hag.” He wipes the sword off on her stupid, overly-frilly neglige. “Life isn’t some fairytale. It doesn’t work like that.”

He leaves her like that and empties out her purses and jewelry boxes, but a sad little trill stops him before he reaches the balcony for a proper getaway.

He knows he shouldn’t, but he looks back.

The Kinshi chick warbles at him with big, liquid, iron-gray eyes from behind the carved bars of its priceless little cage.

He clenches his jaw.

* * *

He crosses paths with Rowe not long after he leaves Enbarr, and the rest, they say, is history. Years pass, choices are made, many a clandestine bargain is struck…

Once Aelfric is dealt with and the professor has endeavored to usher all of the Ashen Wolves under their relentless wing, Yuri finds himself stepping back into old Garreg Machproper for the first time in what feels like ages. He tilts his head back, lets the wind sift through his hair, ignores Constance’s immediate switch to doom and gloom—

“Linhardt! Edelgard!” A booming voice cuts across the courtyard. “There you guys are! Hubert’s been going absolutely _insane._ Where’ve you been?!”

Yuri straightens himself, eyes snapping back open, and finds himself looking at a boy with Bergliez blue eyes and a girl’s hind-quarters hoisted prominently up on his shoulder.

It’s certainly not the _worst_ welcome he’s ever received, all things considered. The boy is handsome enough in that bred-for-it Adrestian sort of way, if a bit on the short side, and the derrière is shapely and toned, like the lithe, pale legs attached to it. They’re clad in tight shorts and a skirt a bit more pleated than the standard uniform he recalls, so he imagines the owner of the whole package must either have a history of frequent, swift bursts of running, or equestrian experience.

“Caspar, please,” the Imperial Princess sighs deeply and pinches the bridge of her nose. “We’ve talked about this. _Put Bernadetta down.”_

Yuri’s brain makes the rough mental equivalent of a dagger scraping across a chalkboard, and his pleasant smile freezes in place.

Caspar probably-von-Bergliez blinks, then laughs. “Whoops. Sorry, Bernadetta!” He bends and releases the girl he had slung over his shoulder like a sack of flour. She scrambles to her feet and whirls around, hands fisting in the hem of her skirt as she pins him with a watery, iron-gray attempt at a glare. She’s small and pale and her purple mop of hair clearly hasn’t seen a comb since the last time _he_ brushed it, but sure enough, it’s Bernadetta von Varley herself.

The last time Yuri felt quite like this, a seventh golem had just appeared like a bolt from the blue, six feet in front of him.

Beside him, Linhardt yawns. It feels as though he hears it from a mile away. “What was that about Hubert?”

Bernadetta lets out a soft whimper and shivers, ire forgotten in the wake of whatever memory that stirs up. Years and lifetimes later, Yuri’s fingers still twitch ever so slightly as he quashes the old urge to reach out and pat her head to soothe her.

“He’s been making us all buddy-up,” Caspar explains to whoever actually cares about that. “Y’know, just in case we disappeared like you guys did, too. Bernadetta slipped out so Hubert said I had to go with her and come back soon, _or else.”_ He snorts, crossing his arms. “Normally I wouldn’t worry, but with _you_ gone? I wouldn’t put it past him to chain us to our desks in the classroom and run headcounts every hour until you got back.”

“I-I can be totally safe by myself! In my room! _Alone!”_

Her voice hits him like a punch to the gut. It’s lower than it used to be and edged in stress and anxiety from direct and continuous exposure to the mysterious Hubert, apparently, but it’s still the same as he remembers. Same cadence, same faint, petulant extension of syllables, same soft, glum finish for when she knows a victory isn’t and never has been in the cards for her in the argument at hand.

They hadn’t argued _much_ back in the day, given who he was and what he was trying to accomplish, but he had usually won, regardless.

“Bernadetta,” Edelgard says again, this time directly. Yuri’s brain has another dagger-screech moment, before he forcibly reroutes his attention. “We shall address you sneaking out later—”

“Eep!”

“—but as it stands,” the princess continues, either unyielding or used to Bernadetta’s quailing. “I will capitalize on this rare chance and introduce you to the new allies we’ve made recently. Given your… proclivities, it’s entirely possible you’ll run into them when you next see fit to leave your room, and I want to minimize any… undue alarm.”

The tone of her voice carries the tired expectation that undue alarm will definitely still be involved.

“New…?” Bernadetta blinks, and then _finally_ seems to catch sight of the other House members and the Ashen Wolves, who have been watching this entire tableau so far. Her eyes go wide and she trembles, gaze darting from face to face with the expression of a small animal finally seeing a trap as it starts to close in on her.

He knows the exact moment she sees _him,_ because time stops.

Or at least, it feels like that to him; his heart goes still in his chest as their gazes lock, everything fades to the background, the world, it seems, goes still.

He parts his lips, with no conscious decision as to what he could _possibly_ say once his voice unsticks from his throat. He smiles instead, to buy time.

Bernadetta goes bright red, then goes dead white, then lets out a strangled little scream and _bolts_ away from him, running full tilt the whole way.

The world slams back into motion and a thousand excuses for why she might react like that leap to mind, the instinctive need to run damage control and assuage any concerns as to his new status rushing in to fill the void tunneling down from his chest to the pit of his stomach that goes deeper with each step she puts between them.

Edelgard beats him to the punch before he can say any of them.

“Well,” she sighs. “I suppose that went about as well as can be expected.”

Caspar laughs. “Wow, she actually hung around for almost minute this time! Go Bernadetta.”

“Fifty-one seconds,” Linhardt says, his flat tone either mocking or entirely serious. “Easily a new record, compared to how she nearly climbed Ferdinand like a tree to get away after making her greetings to the professor a few months ago.”

“Huh,” Balthus says, squinting after her rapidly shrinking silhouette and rubbing the back of his neck. “Bit of an odd kid. She’s always like that?”

“Not sure _you_ get to call anyone odd, Baltie,” Hilda scoffs. “But yeah, Dorothea says most of the time she couldn’t even get coaxed out of her room to come to _class,_ before the professor started chipping away at her _._ You guys got pretty lucky, actually seeing her out in the open outside of a mission.”

 _“Rude,”_ interjects the Ashen Demon, firm but expressionless as ever, even up here on the surface. “Bernadetta is a good student, and an excellent officer in the making. She just requires… a bit of maneuvering and leverage, to get her into the right place. And the right state of mind.”

“And the right lockpicks too,” Caspar says, without even a hint of irony. “Or that’s what Petra says, anyways. So, where did you all come from, anyways?”

The conversation and introductions meander on, though it takes a second longer for Yuri to tear his eyes away from the last turn Bernadetta took to get away from them.

From him.

He thinks Hapi notices, but she’s too distracted by tending to Constance as they step out into direct sunlight to follow up with him about it. He bounces back to his normal level of wit and charm seamlessly, aside from that first, unexpected hiccup, and resolves to keep up the appearance of business as usual since he has such a ready-made excuse. It’s a simple plan. It’s a _good_ plan.

It survives exactly as long as it takes for Yuri to attend one of the lectures Bernadetta is almost physically dragged to, these days, and he realizes that while she may be infamously reclusive and fearful, she is also _actively and explicitly_ ** _ignoring him._**

She picks the desk furthest away from him, when she has a choice. She crawls under her own when his seat is too close for comfort. She skips class more and more. She actively _accepts_ going on missions with other Houses, then makes the most miserable little noise when she realizes that he has been invited along as well.

The professor helps, when the problem becomes so obvious it merits direct intervention, but Bernadetta finds a way to shrink away from him and minimize the amount of time they spend together no matter how many group tasks or lunches they’re paired together for.

More drastic measures may be required.

He lingers at the entrance of the greenhouse for hours, one day, and almost doesn’t realize she has crawled out past him through the greenery until she is already running away with leaves in her hair and dirt on her knees.

Dedue gives him a long, loaded look, and turns back to the flowers he is repotting in silence.

Yuri has never felt so judged, frankly.

The incident is more than a little incendiary, and probably the precipitating cause of why he promptly tosses his current plans aside and turns to actively cornering Bernadetta late one evening in the cathedral after choir practice, which under normal circumstances he’s informed she chooses to avoid as passionately as he does.

She’s humming peacefully, up until the second she sees him. He hears her mutter some nonsense about hiding and stones and blithely ignores it, choosing instead to hail her, brightly.

“Hey, Bernadetta!”

“Ah! You can see me?!”

Okay, not the most _auspicious_ of beginnings, as conflict resolution efforts go, but he’s dealt with worse before.

“Clearly,” he sighs. “You’re a tricky one. Always trying to hide when I’m around.” Even if it drives her to playing dead or crawling through the dirt. There are people—or, well, _were_ people—that he has actively and viciously menaced who are—or were—less desperate to get away from him. Honestly, he’s starting to get a little bit offended over this reception; he never even managed to _do_ anything to her, and he’s still being treated like the second coming of Nemesis himself.

“S-Sorry!” She looks up at him with those big, watery eyes of her, trembling and the very picture of contrition. “Please forgive me!”

“If you want forgiveness, then explain yourself,” he insists, his eyes narrowing. She’s being absurd, asking for forgiveness from the man who once nearly killed her, but he’s sick of beating around the bush. He wants to know what warped logic is making her act like this. “But make it quick,” he tacks on, at that thought. “You always ramble on.”

Bernadetta responds with about as much tact and obedience as she usually does. “Um, well,” she wrings her hands in front of him, and he quashes the urge to grab them and keep her still, the way he did when they were small. “When I was little, my mother and father, they—”

“You’ve gotta be kidding,” he muttersunder his breath, before pinning her with an unamused look. “Cut to the chase, please.”

“Uh…” She flinches, then finally spits it out. “You… you remind me of one of my old friends.”

… _what?_

His brows raise, along with a knot of odd feelings he doesn’t feel inclined to untangle here and now. “Oh come now,” he coaxes, to buy some time. “Whoever this friend of yours is, they can’t _possibly_ compare to me.”

“I’m telling the truth!” Bernadetta insists, stomping one foot against the fine marble with a snap that echoes through the cavernous room around them.

“All right, all right,” he pacifies her, before she makes any more of a scene. He doesn’t want an audience for this, however it shakes out. “What was this friend like, then? The way you run and hide from me, they must’ve been a real piece of work.”

“That’s not it at _all,_ ” she says, shaking her head with more determination than he really expected. “My friend was gentle—”

 _When it suited him,_ Yuri amends for her. Even way back then, he gave about as good as he got, when he was escaping the Count’s security detail, after all.

“Trustworthy…”

 _As if,_ he thinks. He’s not sure who she’s trying to fool. Perhaps she’s worried about other people listening in, too.

“Gorgeous.”

 _Always,_ he has to admit, and preens a bit despite his lingering annoyance with her fussiness.

“And... well, he was the only person who was ever nice to me,” she says, still just as embarrassingly open and candid as he remembers. “We used to run around the gardens playing together.” A fragile, fond smile steals across her face.

“And _why_ is it you keep running away from me?” Yuri steers this interrogation back on target, before they both get lost down the winding path of memory lane.

She freezes, and the smile melts away. “That’s, uh…” She shrinks back, but he made sure to cut off any avenues of escape, this time. “D-Do I really have to say? We hardly even know each other!”

 _I knew you better than_ ** _anyone,_** he snarls back in his head, with far more vitriol than he expected or such a statement really merits in the first place. He makes sure it doesn’t leak out, and shakes his head with an artful sigh. “You never _have_ to do anything,” he assures her, as if there’s actually a chance of him letting her go without settling this, one way or another. “But if you don't, you and I won't have a shot at knowing one another, and you'll carry on avoiding me forever.”

“But that’s no good either!” Gratifyingly, she wilts at the very thought. “…okay, okay! I’ll tell you!” She bites her lip, takes a deep breath, and stares hard at the floor, each successive word coming out like pulling teeth. “The thing is, because of me, he got in trouble. After that, I never saw him again.”

He knows that part, though he wouldn’t quite phrase it that way himself, but he manages to keep from showing any outward impatience.

“You see,” she says, still hesitant and defeated. “My father hated commoners, and when he found out I was spending a lot of time with one… Well…”

He wants to tell her to stop dressing it up so prettily, to call it what it was—a betrayal, a lie, worse—but something snaps in her and her head whips up, and he’s stunned into silence by the tears swimming in her eyes and the look of utter, unmistakeable self-loathing painted clear across her face.

“He's probably _dead_ now! ” She wails.

His jaw drops open, slightly, but she pays him no mind.

“And it's all my fault! It's 'cause of me! He… he must've _hated_ me!” She continues, distraught but unstoppable.

“That… ugh.” He reels back, each cry of dismay landing like a haymaker from Balthus. “That doesn’t sound right to me.” Any of it. “Why would you think all that? Nothing you did would make his death your fault.” Frankly, Bernadetta was the only true innocent in that catastrophe of an assassination. “And hating you for something that isn’t your fault is absolutely absurd—delusional, even.”

He can’t even begin to wrap his mind around blaming _her_. For… any part of it, really.

“You’re wrong!” She insists, which is… just as… absurd to say…

Oh.

 _Oh,_ he realizes. She really… doesn’t understand what going on at all, does she? Or what happened back then, for that matter.

“He'd definitely hate me if he knew!” She finally looks at him, her expression defiant and despairing in equal measure. “How would _you_ know, anyway? What, did you know my friend or something?”

“In a manner…” He fights the urge to rub his face, scrapping the mangled remains of his original plan entirely. “Right.” There’s only one way to get through to her on this one, he supposes. “So, remember back when you were a kid? You tripped while holding some gardening shears. And your friend got cut pretty badly.”

She hems and haws for a moment, her brow knitting in thought before recollection dawns. “Oh yeah! I remember…” She had better. It was a miracle he came out of it without a scar. “But… how did _you_ know about that?”

“If I bore you any ill will,” he assures her, “it would have been for cutting my face with those damn shears.”

“Cutting your face…” she sputters weakly. “Shears… But! There’s no way!”

“But there is,” he counters mercilessly. “That friend? That was _me,_ Bernadetta.” He claps her on the shoulder, feeling light and bright all of a sudden. It felt good, to finally say that to her. “Anyway, I'm glad I finally got to hear how you felt about all of that. Let's spend time together and chat about the good ol' days. Get to know each other again.”

He shoots her a wink and saunters off, leaving her sputtering in his wake.

He thinks that’s the end of it with uncharacteristic optimism, and that thanks to her ignorance and her father’s odd silence on the truth of the matter, they can just pick right back up where they left off, all those years ago.

Of course, it’s not _remotely_ that easy.

She trades hysterical avoidance for a fumbling attempt at looming along the fringes of his awareness. It’s a bit like when she would trail after him when they were children, admittedly, except with her clinging to the walls and shrubbery rather than his hand or shirt.

He confronts her again, but this time with radically less progress. Despite her continued obliviousness to the truth of what brought him to the Varley estate all those years ago, she accuses him of wanting to kill her in the most dramatic, inefficient ways anyone could ever even conceive.

Pushing her into a ravine? Sinking her into the _ocean?_

He’s almost more offended she thinks he’d be that sloppy, but not even that can trump the sick, creeping realization that he really is going have to lay out the whole ugly truth out for her.

Luckily or unluckily, he never quite figures out which, the world goes to hell in a hand basket before he can find the time to corner her yet again.

* * *

It’s another five years before he sees her in the flesh again.

Taking care of his people kept him busy, in the interim. He has blackmarkets to regulate, men to recruit or _retire_ as necessary, orphans to settle, information to gather and sell in careful, measured doses—five years practically _flies_ by, really, and he only spares a thought for her and the things left unfinished between them once or twice.

…a day.

Usually.

Regardless, five years comes and goes, and the Black Eagles Strike Force reconvenes, and the professor rises again, inexplicably, and more impossibly than even that Bernadetta von Varley has the absolute _gall,_ the utter _audacity_ to stumble back into his life clad in a bodice and skirt that fits her like a fucking glove, all but oozing fine embroidery and understated, battle-ready elegance in each curve-hugging inch of fabric. Her hair is always neatly brushed, now. She wears a modicum of _makeup,_ now.

Yuri is so appalled he can’t look at her directly for the better part of a week, but eventually the itch of her continued lurking prods him into cornering her once more for the sake of finishing this.

…whatever _this_ is.

“Frigid ocean waters!” Bernadetta yelps, seamlessly consistent in her completely ridiculous fears. It’s almost enough to make him smile. “I can feel them already…” She rubs her arms with a frantic little shiver, which does things to the cleavage her damnable bodice eposes that Yuri _refuses_ to dwell upon.

“Calm,” he coaxes her. “Caaaalm. Just listen to me for a minute. There’s… something I need to tell you.”

He takes a breath.

Lets it out.

Looks her in her big, iron-gray eyes, wide and wary as they are.

Nothing left but to rip the bandage off, he supposes, and finally quits procrastinating.

“The reason I worked for House Varley, Bernadetta,” he says, clear and steady, “was to kill you.”

It takes a moment, for her knee-jerk persecution complex to rise up, falter, and fall by the wayside, but he patiently lays it all out. The motive that bankrolled him, the means he used, the tipping point…

His ultimate failure.

To her credit, aside from the initial disbelief, she does follow along for the most part. She fumbles with the idea of her father running him off to protect her, for some reason, which he doesn’t quite understand; part of the reason she had been so easy to befriend was because she had been kept tucked away and guarded on all fronts from relatives and rival noble children her age, back then. The Count guarded her as jealously as some heirloom jewel, as he understood it.

But, as he assured her long ago, he doesn’t give a shit about her father, frankly. The most he’s thought of the man since the bruises faded was a vague sense of reassurance that he’d be even more on guard for any more attempts on Bernadetta’s life, after Yuri left it.

“At this point,” he says, steering things back on track and snapping her out of her bewildered ruminations on that, “I figure it's you who hates me, and not the other way around.”

Ridiculously, the words are almost unbearably sour on his tongue.

By the way Bernadetta jolts in surprise, it’s every bit as unpalatable a thought to her, which is… more than he’d bothered hoping for, honestly.

“I don’t hate you, Yuri!” She shakes her head, almost frantic. “But, I mean…” She frowns, running a gloved hand through her hair, almost tousling it back into Officer’s Academy Era messiness. “I do feel weird… but, I don’t know _how_ to feel… I just—” She looks up at him, uncertain and pleasing and so, so hopeful it makes his chest constrict painfully. “Can’t we just be friends? Like back then?”

Yuri is so shocked you could knock him over with a feather, at that offer, despite it being exactly what he was angling for, five years back.

“You want to be friends?” He parrots back, eyes wide. “With… me?”

With _him._ Yuri, not the Garden Boy. The caustic trickster, not the honey-tongued honeytrap. Him, the criminal, him, the scoundrel, him, the one who raised that blade up and almost, _almost_ brought it down in the dark, years and years and years ago.

“The reason you couldn’t kill me was because we were friends, right?” Bernadetta asks him, eerily on point with her own train of thought.

This is the part where he should say ‘yes’. The part where he should affirm that it’s the exact reason, that she’s right, that it’s still true. The part where he closes the book on their estrangement, and they can pick back up with the banter and innocent intimacy, just like he’s craved since he put his back to Varley County.

He doesn’t. He hesitates. “Well…”

“You were my first friend,” she presses on, suddenly relentless. “My very _first_ friend. The person who played with me. The first person who went on adventures with me. The first—“

“And _you_ were the first friend I had to baby that much,” he cuts in, because his chest has gone from tight to throbbing, because he has an inkling as to what other _first_ he might be for her, because he is beating back the dawning, horrified realization that she might have been a certain _first_ for him too. Might… _still_ be that.

“What do you mean?!” She poutsat him, shoulders squaring and chin raising high. Something in him warms. Something he doesn't care to name goes soft. He's struck with the sudden urge to tell her to stop there, but doesn't follow through on it. “Well..." She falters, briefly, before shaking off the hesitance and plowing ahead. "Even so... You were the first friend who cared for me!”

_“Don’t bother playing coy over something so obvious. It’s clear as a bell that the boy was in lo—”_

…fuck.

Oh, fuck.

Yuri has just tumbled down a precipice he has been blindly, stubbornly edging around for literally most of his life now.

Luckily, his mouth keeps going even if his brain is caving in on itself. “The whole thing was probably a sham anyway,” he drawls. After a beat he tips his head with a sigh, conceding. “Though, you know... Even if it was... I did have a lot of fun with you.”

“I knew it!” She beams at him.

He grins back, without even planning to ahead of time.

He is so, _so_ fucked.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Look. _Look_. I know I have a bunch of other things that need writing, I swear, but the DLC ransacked my life and wouldn't let me go until I got this out of my system. I needed content but there wasn't any yet, and things got... out of hand. God help me, there's probably going to be a follow-up, because I probably can't leave that damn A Rank half-fixed.
> 
> Also I got a [twitter](https://twitter.com/shanatical) recently, and I have no idea how to use it, but feel free to follow me or hit me up there, if you like.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Bernadetta knows some things. Not a lot, not by a long shot, but she does know _some_ things.

Bernadetta thinks about Odilo every single day of her life.

Usually, it’s about the good times, the bright times that seem so far behind her now, but that she can still take out and turn over like a lucky charm when her isolation wavers on the knife’s edge between comforting and choking. Sometimes, on the _really_ bad days, he’s the only thing she can think about at all.

His warm, gentle hands; his warm, gentle words; his warm, gentle, beautiful, _patient_ eyes—

Gone.

_Forever._

All because of her.

He haunts her dreams, both good and bad. He lingers at the edge of every failed social interaction and hangs back in the silence after the rare successful ones. He is a ghost and guiding star in equal measure, is for years and _years,_ until suddenly she meets _Yuri Leclerc_ and the bottom of her world drops out.

He’s the spitting image of Odilo; just as poised, just as stunning, when a cornerstone of her life has been built upon the quiet acceptance that nobody—not Edelgard, not Ferdinand, not even Lady Rhea—can rival his looks. She hadn’t imagined anyone in the _world_ could ever equal her old friend, and yet…

There’s Yuri, all the same.

Flawless and cavalier, charming and convivial in a way sharper than Odilo’s softness, but no less beguiling. No less magnetic. No less jaw-droppingly _gorgeous._

So, of _course_ she avoids him, even more than she avoids everyone else.

She has to. Her heart feels like its being clawed apart every time she locks eyes with _Yuri_ around the monastery, the grief still every bit as fresh and sharp as it was the first day without Odilo, when the initial shock and horror were still lodged awkward and deep, like so much shrapnel.

She doesn’t trust herself to not call out the wrong name, to not cling to he wrong hand, and she knows being shaken off or treated as a weird, clingy stranger by a man with that face her will utterly, absolutely destroy her more than anything else ever has or ever could.

Then she finds out Yuri actually _is_ Odilo, and…

Well, five years come and go before she even begins to meaningfully process the implications of that.

Odilo is alive.

Odilo is Yuri.

Yuri has always been alive.

Odilo didn’t hate her.

Odilo is Yuri.

Odilo has never hated her.

Time flies through her fingers as she wrestles with those simple, impossible truths. Everybody comes back, just like they promised during their Academy days—even the professor.

Even Yuri.

And, like he had before, like he always seems to, he tracks her down and cracks the bedrock of her world without batting a lash. He tells her that he was sent to kill her, and that… she can accept that.

If Odilo had killed her, she thinks in that instant, then at least Bernadetta would have died happy. She’s surprisingly okay with the thought, but probably only because it’s _him._ She doesn’t get the chance to say any of that, to tell him he was the last thing to make her truly, wholly happy in a a lasting way, thankfully, but only because her throat goes tight at the rest of the explanation.

Her father caught Yuri redhanded. _That’s_ why he chased him off.

“You're lucky to have a father who cares for you enough to do that,” Yuri says, almost offhandedly, and for a moment she can hear nothing but a soft, sudden rushing in her ears.

It sounds like the creak of the linen she strained against, during her lessons.

She knows, she _knows_ he doesn’t know what happened after he was chased away.

She knows he doesn’t have a clue about what happened when her mother left to work in Enbarr and her father took charge of teacher her ‘proper etiquette’ for a soon-to-be Adrestian noblewoman. She knows he must just be remembering how _glum_ she used to be over being scolded or ignored in favor of her father’s endless business meetings and deals, oblivious to the total nightmare she was dodging by chance.

If they were still just little Bernie and Odilo, having adventures in the sprawling Varley gardens, she’d tell him everything in a heartbeat. If things were simple, she could just _say_ it, cry into his shoulder, be soothed and consoled until her father faded away in the face of her friend’s steadfast warmth and affection.

But things _aren’t_ simple.

She’s starting to realize that they never actually were, probably.

There’s a tension running through him, she can notice now thanks to her time in combat. He’s bracing for a blow, though not a physical one, and it shocks her right out of her pained recollections.

“Can't we just be friends?” She begs him, fumbling through her stance, mixed-up feelings before he can retreat. “Like before?”

For once, she manages to surprise _him,_ apparently, but her dogged insistence and stubbornness wins the day and finally— _finally_ —she has what she has spent years and years and years yearning for back in her life.

Very… _firmly_ back in her life.

“Bern, sweetie,” Dorothea says slowly, eyebrows lifting. “Is there… anything you’d like to share?” She’s speaking to Bernadetta, but staring directly at Yuri, who happens to have her seated on his lap while he perches on a low wall, just like he used when they were kids.

Bernadetta keeps her eyes firmly on the arrows she’s re-fletching, and damns her fair, Ohgma Mountains complexion, because she can _feel_ the blood rushing to her cheeks and ears even though this is _totally_ innocent when one has the right context.

Yuri wraps an arm around her, pulling her more firmly back against his chest so he can hook his chin over her shoulder and watch her work. His other hand rests palm-down on her thigh, fingers idly tapping out a beat on her knee.

Bernadetta, jumpy fool that she is, nearly stabs herself in the eye with a feather, despite the fact that he did this countless times when she would work on her embroidery or scribble out her first, faltering attempts at a narrative.

“No,” she squeaks, too high and too late to be remotely believable. “Nope, no, nothing… nothing to share here!”

“She’s right,” Yuri says, and at point blank range like this it rumbles against her spine, almost as though he _purrs_ out the words. But that’s crazy; that sort of thing only happens in stories. “I’ve certainly never been known for sharing what’s mine—she knows that best of all.”

He _had_ always been very particular about a few of his more personal items, Bernadetta concedes, thoughts faint as the rest of her brain goes blank and gibbers stupidly. There was a notebook he was particularly protective of, she recalls, because wracking her memory is a better use of her energy than dealing with… this… this… than dealing with whatever _this_ is.

She knows he must be using a roundabout way to ask her not to share their past, which is… well, a bit uncomfortable, given that Dorothea knows the first version of events that haunted Bernadetta for so long.

But Yuri asked.

Er…

W-Well, he’s sort of, not- _quite_ -asking. But the intent is clearly there, she’s pretty sure!

And she’s never been able to say no to him, regardless.

“It’s true,” she says, supportive even if her voice still wavers a little, embarrassingly. “He’s… honestly a little petty about it, sometimes.”

“Hey,” Yuri huffs, pinching her hip. She squirms away and he drags her back in, hooking a leg around her shins to pin her snugly back into his embrace. He’s probably trying to keep her from tumbling down by accident; he’s always thinking ahead like that. “If you want to see _petty,_ I can sure show you what that _really_ means, Ber-na-detta.” He practically _sings_ her name out. “Just say the word and I’d be happy to, really.”

“I-I didn’t say anything!” She denies immediately, dropping her head back so she can show him a look of earnest innocence.

Dorothea coughs once, pointedly and pitched to carry, and Bernadetta whips that look her way as well.

“See?” Yuri presses his cheek to hers. Bernadetta can’t see what look _he’s_ wearing, but it makes Dorothea’s eyes narrow. “Nothing to report. You can go off your merry way, now.”

“Actually,” Bernadetta pipes up, feeling the tension in the air ratchet up a few notches for some reason. “I’m… I’m all done, now. I’d like to go on _my_ merry way. I-If… that’s okay.”

“Of _course_ it is,” Yuri assures her, squeezing her in a way that makes her heart beat halfway out of her chest. She’s so distracted she doesn’t notice him firing off a Foul Play until she realizes she’s on her feet on the ground and Dorothea is stranded up where they were, sputtering in shock.

“What the—?!”

“Well, you heard the woman. Catch you later, Dorothea!” Yuri calls, shooting the songstress a lazy two-fingered salute and a wink over his shoulder, before wrapping his arm low around Bernadetta’s waist and steering her along.

“Bern! _Bernadetta!_ We are having _words_ later, missy, just you wait and see!”

Bernadetta winces, but doesn’t turn back. She’s in for it the net time the war table reconvenes, surely, but that’s a problem for Future Bernie.

Here-and-Now Bernie has plenty of problems of her own.

Here-and-Now Yuri leans his weight against her playfully, nearly sending them careening into a wall before she musters her strength and sets them back on course. In spite of herself, in spite of her mounting dismay and the conundrum of figuring out Future Bernie’s explanation for Future Dorothea, she laughs.

Then, or now, or in the future, he always seems to know just how to make her laugh.

Her heart flutters right now just as much as it ever did.

Maybe even more, if that’s possible.

* * *

She’s so caught up in the war and the Here-and-Now, she ends up missing something that is probably actually really, _really_ obvious to anyone who’s been paying remotely more attention than she has. It’s a bit like the Jeritza-Death Knight incident all over again, honestly.

What she misses is this: somewhere between his confession and now, Bernadetta has become one of Yuri’s people.

…well, frankly, she likely always has been, given how he never actually lets anything go no matter how much he smiles or banters, but now he’s being particularly blatant about it.

He never contests Edelgard’s claim on her, obviously—she’s the Emperor, _Bernadetta’s_ emperor, the one she swore and more importantly _chose_ to serve, despite the countless risks—but outside of battle and assignments he more often than not tries to shepherd her off towards his usual knot of followers and allies when she’s free, even if he has to muscle in on her time with the original Eagles.

Linhardt has a slew of snide remarks he lobs at the other man when he feels up to it, and Caspar is still easily rerouted by somebody as sly as Yuri. Petra and Dorothea are usually stubborn and crafty enough to win as often as they lose out.

Inasmuch as… well, as much as _anyone_ can win against Yuri, that is.

Yuri doesn’t actually… _talk_ … to Ferdinand. Not while she’s around, anyways. And he and Hubert, on the odd occasion when the latter isn’t at Edelgard’s side, usually just share an intense, extended, _unsettling_ look before one of them takes her arm and leads her away, wordlessly.

It’s terrifying, frankly.

“He’s staring again,” Jeritza says in his usual slow, abrupt manner, his grip tightening ominously on his spoon, which is all kinds of terrifying itself.

“Oh no,” Bernadetta murmurs, passing a hand over her eyes.

Lunches with Jeritza have been the hardest sell so far, but one she planted her feet and refused to budge on, because she _needs_ the quiet and breathing room she only really finds at this table. She _knows_ Yuri is itching to come over, to lean into her space, to dissect her fragile, fledgeling friendship with the infamous Death Knight, to do who even _knows_ what.

Recruit him for after-war employment, maybe.

She’s asked him not to while they’re eating, whatever it is.

She’s surprised but pleased to find that just asking is enough, honestly. It makes her stomach flutter as much as her heart though, so for the most part she doesn’t think about it too hard; it would only sabotage her hard-won, peaceful, mostly silent lunches.

“He’s still staring,” Jeritza reports, eyes boring over her shoulder, doubtlessly locked with her other friend’s in a contest of wills even scarier than what Hubert and Yuri get up to, or so she’s willing to bet.

“I’ll talk to him about it,” she promises him.

Jeritza makes a low noise of acknowledgement, like one of the Monastery cats dismissing a bird fluttering around too far away to bother with, and instead turns his attention back to the peach sorbet the Quartermaster managed to lay hands on, somehow.

Lunch finishes peacefully.

“Pardon me, dear Bernadetta,” Constance bids her with a curtsey more proper than Bernadetta has ever managed. “I shall fill your vacancy, if it suits you.”

“I don’t mind,” Bernadetta assures her, picking up her empty dish. Jeritza took seconds, today, but she has reports to review that Hubert is expecting her input on by tonight. She gets along well enough with the heir of House Nuvelle, really, it’s just that they have a tacit understanding about being considerate and not crowding their mutual friend.

“Bernie-bear,” Hapi hails her before she can get too far, hooking an elbow through hers and steering her off course. “Walk with us.”

‘Us’ becomes eminently clear when a large, corded arm slings itself over not just Bernadetta’s but _both_ of their shoulders, hauling them close.

“Yeah!” Balthus cheers. “We’ve been seeing’ your face a lot more often, but I can’t say we actually know much about you, ‘sides that your Yuri’s little _lady_ friend.” He waggles his eyebrows at her, and she sputters in shock.

“It’s—he’d never—” She shakes her head, wordlessly. “N… no. We’re… _I’m_ not. That. For, uh, for him.”

“Huh. That mean you’re someone _else’s_ ladyfriend?” Hapi asks, evoking a new, more incredulous round of sputtering.

“No!” The word tears out of her. “No, never, not… not me.” She stares between them, wild-eyed and gaping. “I… I can’t think of a single person who would even _want_ me as their… um, as their ‘ladyfriend.’” Goddess, the term sounds so much sillier, coming from her. The very notion is ridiculous.

But, for some reason, the two Ashen Wolves are looking at her as though _she’s_ the ridiculous one.

“You _can’t?”_ Balthus asks. “Not even, like… _one?”_

“Not even one,” she confirms, her voice as small and miserable as she feels in that moment. The phantom echo of her father’s usual condemnations rings through the hallway right on cue.

_Unmarriageable._

_Worthless._

_Clumsy._

_Fool._

_Unlovable._

_Who would_ **_ever_ ** _want—_

“Huh.” Hapi makes that small noise again. “Well, whenever you realize you’re wrong about that, I accept concession gifts in the form of coffee, smoked meat, or one of those carnivorous plants you’ve been raising, when you realize that you’re _really_ wrong.”

Just like that, Bernadetta is snapped out of it. It’s easier to bounce back these days, with her father stripped of his title and miles and miles away.

“Wait, _you_ like carnivorous plants too, Hapi?” She perks up, beaming. “Oh, wow! It feels like ages since somebody’s been willing to talk about that with me! What sort do you like the most, Hapi?”

“Uuuugg _ggh,”_ Balthus groans, leaning his weight in more and nearly toppling the three of them entirely. “Do we _have_ to talk about gardening of all things? C’mon, dish dirt on ‘ole Yuri instead.How did you two crazy kids find each other, anyways?” He shoots her a wink. “Way I hear it, you never got out much, but he was chasing you around like a tomcat even back when school was still in session.”

“That’s,um, that’s _really_ not what he was doing,” Bernadetta insists weakly. Her face feels like it’s on fire at the very notion of _Yuri_ —

…well, actually, he _did_ chase after her, it’s true, but that was… that was just him trying to clear the air. That was just him being…

“He’s—he’s just a friend. A-A good friend!” Bernadetta says. “A really… _really_ good friend.”

“Uh- _huh_ ,” says Balthus, slow enough that she thinks she might actually be getting through to him… up until he shoots her another wink. “I gotcha, missy. It’s good for a man to have a little chase; keeps things interesting.”

“That’s…” She chokes on her tongue. “That’s really—I-I mean, he doesn’t—he wouldn’t—”

“No, I get it,” Hapi says, in her usual tone, wich could mean… just about anything, really. She shoves them all back upright too, as though Balthus is light as a feather, without a hint of strain. “Coco and I are ‘really, really good friends’ too.”

_“Exactly,”_ Bernadetta nods, a sigh of relief gusting out of her.

Hapi and Balthus exchange a look over her head she doesn’t quite catch, but the three of them carry on in that vein. It ends up cutting into her report-reading time, though, and once she’s done with that, and a debriefing-slash-dinner with Hubert, _and_ her evening workout and bath, she essentially collapses into bed without so much as a second thought. She’s asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow.

Her first mistake, she realizes only after she wakes up some indeterminate amount of time later, was taking her eyes off Yuri.

She squints through the darkness, casting about for whatever it was that woke her up, but the search is a short one.

Yuri is seated on the edge of her bed in his shirtsleeves, nearly pressed right up against her belly. His back is to her, and one gloved hand is clenched in her sheets. She stares up at him, an almost eldritch figure in the dim trickle of moonlight her curtains don’t quite catch, and for a long moment she’s not sure that this is really happening, ghosting along the edge of dreamland as she is.

“You didn’t _tell_ me,” he says after what could be a minute of silence or an hour, finally shattering the odd, thick silence of her room.

“M’sorry,” she says thickly on reflex, before her mind begins to lurch into motion and her brow furrows. “…what didn’t I tell you?”

The fist on her covers clenches until the cotton of the sheets squeaks in his grip.

“About that _man,_ ” Yuri says, and she’s never heard him speak quite like this before. There’s an oddness to his voice she can’t begin to place.

“Yuri,” she says, slow and tired, but patient, because he always has been with her for the most part. _“What_ man?”

“Count Varley,” he says, the syllables snapping out cold and sharp and jolting her straight into wakefulness. It’s like being plunged into an ice bath, hearing that name getting dropped like this.

Her mind races furiously, because he knows—he _clearly_ knows—he’s so _angry_ —and that selfsame anger is what helps her jumbled, frantic mind connect the dots.

“Jeritza told you,” she breathes.

“Yes,” Yuri turns his head, and she promptly stops breathing. _“Jeritza_ told me.”

“Oh,” she says weakly, and he looks like an unsheathed blade, like sharply hewn marble, like a spike of ice looming out of the darkness.

“Bernadetta—” He releases her sheet and takes her by the shoulders, and he looks, she thinks distantly, very much as though somebody has sheathed a blade in _him._ “You didn’t _tell_ me.”

“I didn’t,” she agrees meekly.

“I—” His mouth twists. “I said you were—that _he_ was—”

Yuri is at a loss for words, she realizes belatedly, as his struggles choke him into silence. _Yuri_ is, fast-talking, witty, man-with-a-thousand-plan _Yuri_ is. She reaches up and presses a hand over one of his.

It’s trembling, as though he’s fighting against the need to clench his hands again, because he is always, always so gentle with her. Even when he’s upset.

“You did,” she agrees softly. “But… but, I knew you didn’t know. What, um, what he ended up being like when we were alone, I mean.”

Odilo had been a gardener’s assistant; an ‘outside’ servant. Bernadetta might have avoided her lessons whenever she had a chance, to avoid the ceaseless criticisms, but the fact to the matter is even _she_ knew about the unspoken hierarchies in the ranks of the help. Chamberlains and footmen never had the blessing of ignorance as to the inner machinations of the main family, but Odilo would never have been in a position to find out about it.

He squeezes his sharp, glittering eyes shut.

“If I had known—”

“Yuri—“ Her other hand comes up to cup his cheek.

“No.” He grabs her wrist and his eyes snap open, piercing into her. He gives her a little shake, possibly without even realizing it. “If I had the slightest inkling—Bernadetta, if I had known, I would’ve grabbed you and _run_. I swear I would have.”

Her throat goes tight again.

“I _swear_ ,” he insists, and he looks wild, he looks forlorn, he looks—

Oh.

_Oh._

This is him cut to his core, isn’t it? Her kind friend. Her gentle friend. Her friend who sweeps up the people who suffer, the people who wander, the people without a place to call their own and calls them all _his._

“I know,” she tells him, her heart so full it’s all but bursting at the seams. “I _know_ , Yuri. I, um…” She hesitates, but it’s something he should hear, she thinks. Something he deserves to hear. “I used to d-dream about it, sometimes. You’d come back, and you’d be fine, and you’d take me—you’d take me far, far away…”

And then she’d feel terrible and guilty in the morning, because how dare she pile that sort of expectation, that kind of impossible _hope_ on the shoulder’s of a boy she had probably gotten killed?

Yuri makes a low noise, a wounded noise, and crushes her tight against his chest.

“I think I’d have been a lot more broken than I am already if it weren’t for you,” she whispers into his shoulder, her bravery bolstered by the unreal darkness and the fact that he can’t see her face as she confesses all of this. “If I didn’t remember what it was like being happy with _you_ when things got bad, then, um, then I think I… I think I probably would have forgotten how to be happy for the rest of my life.”

For a moment, the only sound in the room is his harsh, ragged breaths.

“…yeah,” he says, at length. “Yeah. Me too.”

They sit like that for a long while, silent and clutching at each other in a way she half-suspects will leave bruises come morning. A short eternity later, he tries to pull back, to carefully disengage.

She doesn’t let him, clinging close, and she feels him inhale sharply rather than hear it.

“Stay?” she murmurs, and it’s not quite begging. Not quite an order.

“I—”

“Please, stay.”

Another moment passes. The breath gusts out of him all at once, and he twists his hips sharply without letting her go. There’s two dull thuds soon after that make her realize that he’s just kicked off his boots, and she relaxes.

“Budge over,” Yuri says, and then rolls them both before she has a chance to even try.

She giggles, breathless and strangely giddy, and he snorts, and suddenly they’re _both_ laughing, half-muted with their heads bowed together, squeezed together on her cot, and none of it is funny but it feels…

It feels…

“I missed you,” she confesses, when the laughter subsides and the silence seeps back in. “Every day, I missed you.” she tells him, blatantly honest in the way only the very late night can pull out.

“Yeah.” He sighs again, and presses his mouth to her forehead, firm and lingering. “Yeah, me too.

She nestles into the crook of his neck and he tugs her close, and they stay that way for a long, long time. She falls asleep at some point, and for the first time in a long time she doesn’t have any dreams at all.

When she wakes up, he’s gone.

She’s all alone in her bed, save for a stalk of lavender tucked behind her ear.

* * *

All things considered, a few weeks later when she gets the letter with its official, somber, black wax seal, it isn’t…

Well, it’s not exactly a surprise, really. Yuri _and_ Jeritza, missing a day after that sort of revelation? Bernadetta might not exactly have her finger on the pulse of current events or revelations, but even she knows that something had to have been afoot.

Mainly, she’s surprised that Edelgard and Hubert permitted that sort of diversion at all this far into the campaign rather than promise an execution later, but then she catches the professor’s eye at breakfast one morning and their slow, gentle nod clears things up.

Still, she cracks the seal with more poise than she ever would have expected.

She reads the note.

“My father is dead,” she announces quietly. The words feel strange on her tongue—alien. Impossible, almost, and yet there they are, in her mother’s clear, sharp calligraphy. “He choked on something.”

Her mother doesn’t write what it was. Bernadetta imagines it probably wasn’t something that suited a formal announcement like this, knowing the probable culprits.

“Bernadetta,” Ferdinand murmurs beside her, a hand rising to grip her shoulder. “I am _so_ sorry for your loss.”

“I’m not,” somebody says.

After a moment, Bernadetta realizes that was _her._

Ferdinand goes still and silent for a long moment. Then, steady and without hesitation, he presses a chaste kiss to her cheek and offers her a sad, private smile. “Then, I am sorry that it _is_ no loss, my friend. And… sorrier still, to only know so now.”

She opens her mouth to say something, but he leans back out of her space and back into what is proper, and suddenly all she can see is Yuri, standing in the doorway.

She’s never seen anyone look at _anyone_ the way Yuri’s looking at Ferdinand, right now, like a thief and a beast and some childhood specter brought to life, all at once. He turns on his heel, sharply, and leaves without even looking at her, cape billowing behind him.

Ferdinand’s hand tightens ever so slightly on her shoulder. His gaze slides back to her, and if he were anyone other than Ferdinand von Aegir she would call the look on his face _sly._

“I believe it is perhaps long past the time for the meandering, indirect stipulations of nobility,” he begins.

She gapes at him.

“Who even _are_ you?” She demands, legitimately considering the possibility of an imposter. The letter crinkles in her hand, forgotten in the face of… whatever _this_ is.

“I am Ferdinand von Aegir,” he assures her, his eyes crinkling as he smiles down, soft and fond. “And you, I believe, are a woman with an erroneously jilted lover to attend to, unless I miss my guess.”

“I’m—” She tries.

Ferdinand smiles.

“He doesn’t—“

He keeps smiling.

“We’re not…” She trails off, this time, because…

Because, they actually _are_ , aren’t they? It’s not… it’s not just her. Bernadetta is slowly beginning to realize it might not _ever_ have just been her.

Ferdinand smiles even warmer and wider, clearly reading every stutter and note of this earth-shattering revelation straight off her face.

Bernadetta goes red, then sputters, then jabs him firmly in the chest with her letter-hand and hisses at him to hush, before shaking off his hand and running for the door before he can say anything else. There’s no sign of him in the hall of course, but that’s okay.

She knows where to find him.

The garden is recovering, after all its neglect. Yuri is perched by her pitcher plants, glowering viciously at a plot of nascent marigolds across the way. She knows he knew the second she stepped over the threshold, but he doesn’t look up.

She closes the distance between them.

He continues to avoid her gaze, still sneering at her pride and joy. Or rather, at something else he’s assuming she loves.

“I don’t even know what’s so great about these,” he says, as though he _wasn’t_ the one who first showed her them as a novel little adventure in the more experimental corner the gardener tended to in his spare time.

“Well,” she says, stepping up close to him and ghosting a finger over the outline of her plant. “There are a lot of reasons I love it. I think they’re beautiful, for one. Cute, even.” Surprisingly cute, where she least expects him to be.

“To each their own, I suppose,” he says, tone clipped.

“And they’re sweet. Sweet enough to draw in whatever they want or need,” she continues, reaching down to lace her fingers through his. She feels him stiffen beside her, but neither of them looks away from the plant. “They make me… they make me really, really happy, you know?”

“Oh yeah?” There’s a hint of the usual Yuri seeping back into his voice, and his grip tightens, hand engulfing hers. She can feel the warmth of his hand clear through both of their gloves.

She squeezes back, leaning her head against his shoulder. “Yeah.”

“Sounds like Hapi’s gonna be pretty happy, then,” he says, casual and smooth.

It takes her a moment to connect the dots.

She whips her head up and gapes at him.

He _grins_ down at her, roguish and unrepentant.

“You—Y-You—You—” She sputters fruitlessly, even as his other arm comes up and hooks around her waist, trapping her against him. The other one is laced with hers and raised, in the most improper parody of a dance Bernadetta has ever been party to.

“I-I-I… _what?”_ Yuri mocks her gently, walking her backwards until her spine hits the long, thick pane of glass making up the greenhouse wall. “Let’s see… Maybe, ‘I’ knew you were somehow _still_ missing my signals? Or, ‘I’ knew you’d never want the likes of _Ferdinand von Aegir_ when you could have _me?”_ He smirks. “Or was it, ’I’ knew you’d follow if I left like that?”

“You’re _terrible,”_ she breathes, feeling as though all of the air has been sucked straight out of… everywhere. Forever. She’s dying, clearly, because her pulse is thrumming and her knees are weak and Yuri is very, _very_ close.

“Oh, I’m the absolute _worst,”_ he whispers, mouth a hairsbreadth away from her own. His eyes are not remotely amused, the way Ferdinand’s were. His eyes are like nothing she has ever seen, in this moment, wild and hungry and backlit by the sort of effusive _triumph_ she supposes a carnivorous plant might when it catches a fly, if it felt anything at all.

The sweet scent of the garden presses in around them, cloying and familiar and new, all at once.

She waits, but he doesn’t move. His eyes don’t change, they only gain a gleam of wicked expectation.

She cottons on to what it is he’s angling for, and lets out a soft squeak of… outrage. Yes. That is what she’s feeling right now, for sure.

“The _worst,”_ she confirms, then shifts up and kisses him properly.

He smiles against her mouth, with teeth, and then _surges_ forward, kissing her back with far more expertise than she could ever dream of pulling off. He pins her there, in the dust and daylight, kissing her and kissing her and _kissing_ her.

The letter from her mother lays forgotten by the roots of the pitcher plant, damp and smeared with mud, forgotten.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Okay, _now_ I think this story can stand. Had to squeeze in what we all clearly wanted to happen, of course.


End file.
